A bookmark, in the oldest sense of the word, is a thin marker used to keep one's place in a book so that the user can resume reading it easily from where he left off. Bookmark/resume functions have been implemented in a wide variety of modern electronic devices in an attempt to provide similar functionally with digital content. For example, DVD and Blu-ray Disc players use bookmarks to allow a user to resume playback of a disc when the power to the player is restarted. However, these bookmarks are stored on the player, as bookmarks cannot be written back to optical discs that are read only. Accordingly, unlike a bookmark that travels with a physical book, the bookmarks for DVDs and Blu-ray discs stay with the player and do not travel with the discs. This means that a disc, inserted into a new player, will not retain information about where to resume playback. Accordingly, to resume playback from a previous location, a user would need to manually search for the location by, for example, manually selecting a scene and/or by fast-forwarding to a recorded time code in the scene.
Bookmark functionality has also been implemented in digital audio players, such as the SanDisk Sansa® line of players and the Apple iPod, where a simple time code is used to mark a position in the playback of a song. Only a few digital audio players support removable storage devices (“physical media”), and many of those maintain their bookmarks on the player rather than on the media. One exception is the slotRadio™ card, which maintains bookmarks on the media, with each bookmark being attached to a single instance of a music file.
Bookmarks also are important elements of the online experience. All major web browsers support the storing and management of bookmarks as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). For some browsers, the bookmarks may be called Favorites or Internet Shortcuts. These bookmarks are sometimes precise and are typically independent of a particular instance of a web browser program. Exporting and importing bookmarks between two different computer systems or even between different browsers on the same device is often far from straightforward. Also, shared bookmarks are used in the “Internet cloud,” such as in social networking and streaming video sites.